Raytheon software trolls social networks

Rose Brady hands a coffee to customer Chrissy Antenucci at the Blue Bottle Coffee in Hayes Valley. The chain is beginning to accept payments via the Square Wallet mobile phone app. Square, based in San Francisco, reached a similar deal with Starbucks last year.

Raytheon, a Massachusetts defense contractor, has built tracking software that pulls information from social networks, according to a video obtained by the Guardian newspaper in London.

The gist of the Guardian article:

"The Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with U.S. government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analyzing 'trillions of entities' from cyberspace."

Using public data from Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla and Foursquare, the software - called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology - apparently gathers uploaded information and forms a profile of a person's every move that was registered with one of the websites.

The video obtained by the newspaper starts with a demonstration by Raytheon's "principal investigator," Brian Urch, showing how easy it is to track an employee named Nick - a real person - based on all the places he has checked in using his smartphone.

"When people take pictures and post them on the Internet using their smartphones, the phone will actually embed the latitude and longitude in the header data - so we're going to take advantage of that," Urch says. "So now we know where Nick's gone ... and now we'll predict where he'll be in the future."

Urch goes on to analyze - using graphs and calendars - where Nick likes to spend his personal time and make predictions about his behavior.

"If you ever wanted to get a hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6 a.m. on Monday," Urch says with alarming casualness.

But it's also a reminder that advertisers are not the only ones with interest in the reams of data that social networks collect about regular people. Consider: Had the CIA built a tool like Facebook, we'd probably all be terrified.

And all the tracking data this tool analyzes is provided voluntarily, by us. The satirical news site the Onion, always on point, once joked that the CIA's "Facebook Program" had drastically cut its spying costs.

Users who enjoy posting their lives on computers they don't control - i.e. those of Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al - should not be surprised when that data get out of their control. Some governments, like France, are doing what they can to keep an eye on how social-networking data are used, but at the end of the day, if we don't want Facebook and Twitter using our data, we shouldn't give that to them.

A final note: The Raytheon video features technology from 2010 - three years ago. No doubt the tracking software has come a long way since then.

Blue Bottle Squared: Payment processing service Square on Tuesday followed up last year's huge deal with Starbucks by signing another popular coffee chain, Blue Bottle Coffee.

Square will handle point-of-sale systems for Blue Bottle's 11 outlets, starting with the stores in San Francisco's Mint Plaza, in Oakland and in Brooklyn, N.Y. Customers at those three outlets can immediately start using the Square Wallet mobile phone app to buy coffee or gift cards.

But unlike at Starbucks, the deal with Blue Bottle includes use of the Square Register point-of-sale system. For customers using the Square Wallet app, that means they can just say their name and the system recognizes them.

"We put a great deal of thought into every detail in each of our stores," Blue Bottle founder James Freeman said in a press release. "We think about the right wood for our counters, the best beans, and how we can continue to serve our customers the perfect cup of coffee as we grow. Square's attention to detail and focus on the customer makes Square Register the right choice for our business."

Blue Bottle's reach is just a sliver of the more than 7,000 U.S. Starbucks locations that now accept payment through Square, but revenue for the San Francisco company -with its office in The Chronicle's building - has also been growing through deals with several other smaller regional chains.

Those include Amy's Ice Creams locations in Austin, Texas; Cafe Grumpy in New York; Pitango Gelato in the Washington-Baltimore area; and Cartel Coffee Lab in Arizona.

Square said its revenue from businesses with multiple accounts has increased sevenfold in the last six months.